Achille Bonito Oliva (1939) is an art critic and professor of contemporary art history at the Faculty of Architecture of La Sapienza Università di Roma. He has published many books including The Ideology of the Traitor: Art, Manner and Mannerism, dedicated to Mannerism. He was the director of the 45th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia in 1993.

Cecilia Canziani (1976) is a curator and art historian. Since January 2009 she has been the artistic co-director of the Nomas Foundation in Rome. She teaches at La Sapienza Università di Roma, the Fine Arts Academy of Palermo and the Istituto Europeo del Design. She was the coordinator of the Biennale in Tirana in 2003 and collaborated with the British Museum in its Contemporary Arts and Culture Programme, under the direction of James Putnam.

Roland Krischel is the deputy director of the Wallraf-Richartz and the Corboud Foundation in Cologne, Germany. He has written many books, essays and articles about Tintoretto.

Haroon Mirza (England, 1977) is an artist who makes video and sound installations, using obsolete technological devices and other everyday elements. He is participating in the 54th Exhibition with two works, at the Arsenale and in the Central Pavilion. He won the Silver Lion for a promising young artist in this edition.

Achille Bonito Oliva, “The Archi-sculptors who make houses for other artists”, La Repubblica, June 1st 2011

“The ILLUMInations exhibition confirms the nature of art as epiphany, from Rimbaud to Benjamin, its capacity to originate new visions of the world, improvised, unexpected, surprising. It celebrates light, a specific value of art, especially light in the Veneto region. An emotional and mental element, that reveals truth and knowledge. Three paintings by Tintoretto open the exhibition, to establish that Art designs its past and restores relevance to an artist who used light prophetically. Slashes through space and bright flashes of lightning to represent the scenes of the sacred and the bodies of the profane, a struggle between transcendency and immanence. A vital and necessarily dramatic turbulence permeates the exhibition, from the Central Pavilion to the Arsenale, between settlement and nomadism”.

“Bice Curiger, (…), in regards to the characteristic ‘quickness’ of Tintoretto’s painting, remarks that at the height of the Renaissance, the great Venetian artist chose to represent a subject as excessive as a tempest (the reference is to “The Stealing of the Dead Body of Saint Mark”, one of the three canvases that surprisingly open ILLUMInations) ‘with just three white brushstrokes’. This detail is considered significant, and leads her to make a critical leap by recognizing the sixteenth-century master, not in his canonical role as the precursor of the Baroque era, but as the fore-runner of Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman. Intended as a provocation, the canvas in question is displayed at the entrance to the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, as a proto-conceptualist example of the aesthetics of thought. According to Curiger it is important to emphasize the need expressed by the great Venetian to formalize the very fact that there is light, in an incisive and self-reflecting manner”.

“May Tintoretto never leave my thoughts’ wrote Max Beckmann after a trip to Munich at the end of 1912. Almost one hundred years later – thanks to the insight of Bice Curiger – Jacopo Tintoretto is at the centre of an international showcase of contemporary creation. The curator has not presented just one solution to the artists of the first decade of the twenty-first century, but has found in this Venetian master a secret source of energy, a historical point of reference for modern (and post-modern) art”.